The Shadow of the Cage

Lair is exhausted. He can no longer drink, his wife is dead, and all he gets for his 80th birthday is a visit from his daughter's insufferable family and a lousy cake. But when he casts them out of his house, he receives a tempting call from the beyond.

Based off the poem by H.P Lovecraft, it tells the tale of a dying man who slowly enters a strange dream world where he fades into oblivion.

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Four friends leave Seattle for a weekend in a remote, rain-soaked corner of Washington State's rustic Skagit Valley. The foreboding October landscape begins to warp their minds, plunging each of them into alternate realities where they must grapple with personal demons, sexual tensions, and a sinister natural world as they claw their way back to sanity.

“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in for a mugshot by two officers. She first attempts to avoid the camera’s gaze, and, when overpowered and manhandled, contorts her face to ruin the photograph. However, her small rebellion proves futile; she was already being recorded, objectified, mapped, and co-opted by the Godhead of the director. As her body and image are repurposed and transmuted ad infinitum, the filmic universe also explodes into a supernova. What is born out of this suffering and manipulation is another example of our sublime medium and modern muse. She will not be last the Leda, and she may not even be the first. Who is the guilty party here? Is beauty a chimera in traditional cinema? Has the ephemeral cinema of the attractions and distractions era gone anywhere?

Through experimental editing and the recitation of movie trivia the film comments on the chaos of information in the age of the internet.

Someone wanders through a house while fleeing from a mysterious presence. Their body dissolves on-screen, and their mind is invaded by a strident gray noise.

A photographer during the Soviet-Afghan war becomes obsessed with a mysterious figure that appears in his images every time the person photographed dies.

A neurodivergent man is stuck in the web of an abusive relationship, unable to free himself from his lovers grasp.

Feedback and religious radio noise